ZoneMinder Forums

Good day all.

I would like to record my cameras 24/7 at a low frame rate, say 1-2 FPS.
But I would then like it to record at 25 FPS when there is Motion.

Can anyone please advice how I go about setting this up?

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards.

Others will tell you if this is possible by normal means.

If it isn't, which I suspect, one option would be to setup 2 monitors working off the same camera input.
One will be your motion detecting camera as normal.
The second will be a permanent 2fps 24/7 record monitor.


There are 2 downsides with this:
1. the monitors definitely need to be the same resolution for this to work, not sure about whether they would also need to be the same FPS or not - you'd have to try.
2. it doesn't work with 1.24, only 1.23. See my other posts on this.

Hopefully there will be a better way, but I dont know of one.

Firstly, re-assess why you think you need to do this. It's an unusual way to operate.

Low fps in modect cause many false positives with light changes since there is longer for the scene to change between frames.

If you're set on the why, then comes the how. It should work in the usual way - set min fps higher in the alarmed section, low in the non. I think this means the ring buffer is filled at the alarmed fps and frames to examine are merely pulled at intervals from that - so that when an alarm happens it has the pre-trigger frames all lined up to save at the higher fps. If it's not working like that, either something is wrong or I'm misunderstanding the internals.

I always set up two monitors for each camera. One to record 24/7 at a fairly low fps (3 or 4) and one acting as Modect at 5fps. They aren't linked, just operate entirely seperately. Modect is a great way to review what's happened but it can never be 100% reliable, and recording as well means in practice you have more likelyhood of good recordings.

Interesting - thats exactly what I'm struggling to do - run 2 monitors off one camera?

http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... 9&start=75

Is that 1.24? What cameras are you using? I suspect my issue with the way v4l reads the bttv card, so perhaps you are using something else.

Ah, Sorry I've misled you. I use IP cameras, not analogues.

Don't analogue cameras have fixed fps?

Anyway - there is still a way you can do this.

Setup a single monitor off the card using /dev/video? - recording.

Now, set up a second monitor recording off zm's streaming of the first monitor, as modect.

Eg, type remote, http;

Path: /cgi-bin/nph-zms?mode=jpeg&monitor=3&scale=100&maxfps=3

Change monitor number to that of your first, and zm will capture its own streaming output of the first card and allow you to use it any way you like for a second monitor.

Did you try setting maxfps at 1 or 2 then alarm fps to 25? That should do it.

Personally I have maxfps and alarmfps set to 6 then frame skip (in misc) set to 3. That yields 6fps live view, 6fps saved for alarms and 2fps recorded to disk. My function is set to mocord.

Flasheart,
Thats interesting. I'll give that a go when I get a spare system to play with.
I've probably misled you a little by replying to this thread, as I want to do something different.
I'm not interested in different FPS, I want the ability to have different levels of monitoring. One to capture most things without false alarms, and another that will include everything including false alarms that I can refer to in case anything happens.
However, I guess your approach should work.
One thing though - I did try the URL in my browser (changed of course) and I got a blank screen - no errors. I was expecting a stream?
Thanks